Turkey, Mashed Potatoes, Cranberry Sauce ... Menhaden?

After the Mayflower landed on Cape Cod, Tisquantum—a Native American better known as Squanto, who lived among the nearby Wompanoag tribe—taught the Pilgrims how to properly fish in Massachusetts’s estuaries. Seafood, in fact, likely played a much larger role in the first Thanksgiving feast than the fare we typically enjoy today. But Tisquantum taught the Pilgrims another important trick: how to plant some of their catch in agricultural fields. An acre of corn also seeded with fish has been said to yield three times as many ears. So early colonists buried river herring, shad, and undoubtedly menhaden, another fish in the Culpeidae family . Rhode Island’s Narragansett Tribe called this creature munnawhatteaug : “that which manures” or “he enriches the land.” Pogy, another nickname for menhaden, comes from the Maine Abenaki Indians’ paughagen , which also means “fertilizer.” ...